A-Frame is Awesome

Last March I got an Oculus DK2 so I could play around with creating VR content but my excitement ran into a brick wall called javascript that I don’t understand and expensive tools. Fast-forward 9 months and the Mozilla VR team has just released A-Frame and my excitement is back. Now, I can include a link to aframe.js and write one line of code like this to create a video sphere:<a-videosphere src="360video.mp4" autoplay="true" loop="true" rotation="0 270 0"></a-videosphere>
That’s pretty easy—it looks almost exactly like html for a 2D video:<video src="2dvideo.mp4 controls autoplay="false">
But wait, there’s more. This is Web VR so A-Frame supports desktop, iPhone, Cardboard and Oculus (Android coming soon according to the docs) right out of the box. So with a little time to play around between Christmas shopping, I gave A-Frame a spin.

On the iPhone the video doesn’t play. You just get the first frame and spinning cubes. But you can still look around by moving your phone or put it in a cardboard holder and look around (the cubes are in stereo).

It’s super cool with the Oculus DK2 and even works on a Mac (even though Oculus dropped Mac support).